EDITED BY T. W. ALLEN (Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford), W. R. HALLIDAY (Principal of King’s College, London) AND E. E. SIKES (Fellow and President of St. John's College, Cambridge)
THE first edition of this book was published by Macmillan & Co., Ltd., in the year 1904. Mr. E. E. Sikes of St John’s College, Cambridge, one of the two original editors, has long betaken himself to other provinces, and resisted entreaties to assist in a revision as long ago as 1911, the date of the last Oxford text. I therefore count myself fortunate to have induced Mr. W. R. Halliday, Principal of King’s College, London, and lately Professor of Ancient History in the University of Liverpool, to take part in this edition. We present our acknowledgements to the Delegates of the Clarendon Press for accepting it, to Professor J. L. Myres (as we should have presented them to the late Lewis Farnell) for the recommendation he was pleased to give to it, and to the British Academy for a contribution towards the expenses of production.
The exigencies of publication made it desirable to utilize the plates of the edition of 1911. That apparatus criticus has received correction, but here and there the reader may find repetition. On the other hand the scale of the edition of 1911 only admitted of a minimum of conjectures being recorded; we have, therefore, to suit the convenience of the reader and as a warning to him, collected others in a pillory or limbo (p. 444); even here, however, we have found ourselves unable to give all of them a place. The edition of Eugen Abel (1895) leaves none out.
We hold the view, expressed in the preface to the text of 1911, that documents in a dead language, couched in a familiar dialect, require interpretation rather than alteration, and that interpretation consists in illustration, that is to say in the adducing of similar passages from other ancient authors or monuments. The difficulty of interpreting the Homeric Hymns lies in the circumstance that they are solitary survivors of a class. Much of their subject-matter is unique or nearly so. The nineteenth-century critics, whose scanty knowledge was directed towards assimilating the Hymns to the usage of Homer, and who were possessed by a belief that the Greeks and Latins spent their time in the falsification of their literature, and that mediaeval scribes were unable to read their own writing, altered the wording of the Hymns recklessly and to their ruin. We have done our best to collect illustrative material, with what success the reader may judge, and claim to have recovered the meaning of several passages.
Another result of the small scale of the edition of 1911 was that it was only possible to record the important variants of the MSS. In a book of the present size the reader may expect to find the less important variants also. We have therefore produced the more interesting of them under a separate heading (p. 93).

CONTENTS

Abbreviations of MSS. Titles
 
INTRODUCTION
I. The manuscripts  
II. The relation of the manuscripts to each other
III. The relation of the families to each other
IV. Prosody in the manuscripts
V. The Homeric Hymns in antiquity
VI. Nature of the Homeric Hymns
VII. Language  
VIII. Bibliography  

ΟΜΗΡΟΥ ΥΜΝΟI
I.    Εἰς Διώνυσον Fragmenta Hymni in Bacchum
II.    Εἰς Δημήτραν
III.    Εἰς Ἀπόλλωνα
IV.    Εἰς Ἑρμῆν
V.    Εἰς Ἀφροδίτην
VI.    Εἰς Ἀφροδίτην
VII.    Εἰς Διώνυσον
VIII.    Εἰς Ἄρεα
IX.    Εἰς Ἄρτεμιν
X.    Εἰς Ἀφροδίτην
XI.    Εἰς Ἀθηνᾶν
XII.    Εἰς Ἥραν
XIII.    Εἰς Δημήτραν
XIV.    Εἰς Μητέρα Θεῶν
XV.    Εἰς Ἡρακλέα Λεοντόθυμον
XVI.    Εἰς Ἀσκληπιόν
XVII.    Εἰς Διοσκούρους
XVIII.    Εἰς Ἑρμῆν
XIX.    Εἰς Πᾶνα
XX.    Εἰς Ἥφαιστον
XXI.    Εἰς Ἀπόλλωνα
XXII.    Εἰς Ποσειδῶνα
XXIII.    Εἰς Δία
XXIV.    Εἰς Ἑστίαν
XXV.    Εἰς Μούσας καὶ Ἀπόλλωνα
XXVI.    Εἰς Διόνυσον
XXVII.    Εἰς Ἄρτεμιν
XXVIII.    Εἰς Ἀθηνάν
XXIX.    Εἰς Ἑστίαν
XXX.    Εἰς Γῆν μητέρα πάντων
XXXI.    Εἰς Ἥλιον
XXXII.    Εἰς Σελήνην
XXXIII.    Εἰς Διοσκούρους
Εἰς Ξένους

THE TEXT OF THE HYMNS  
CODICUM VARIETAS LEVIOR

COMMENTARY
I. Dionysus
II. Demeter
III. Apollo
IV. Hermes
V. Aphrodite
VI. Aphrodite
VII. Dionysus
VIII. Ares
IX. Artemis
X. Aphrodite
XI. Athena
XII. Hera
XIII. Demeter
XIV. Mother of the Gods
XV. Hercules
XVI. Asclepius
XVII. Dioscuri
XVIII. Hermes
XIX. Pan
XX. Hephaestus
XXI. Apollo
XXII. Posidon
XXIII. Zeus
XXIV. Hestia
XXV. Muses and Apollo
XXVI. Dionysus
XXVII. Artemis
XXVIII. Athena
XXIX. Hestia
XXX. Ge
XXXI. Helios
XXXII. Selene
XXXIII. Dioscuri
Εἰς Ξένους

CONIECTURAE VERI MINUS SIMILES
ADDENDA
INDEXES:
I. Index of Greek words
II. English Index

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